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EDH Deck Time: Xantcha

What do we do with something like this? Pressure lifetotals. All of them. (Pressuring our own is just a side effect, but still, we are Rakdos, and Rakdos doesn’t care. Some of these also have the side effect of gaining life, so it should balance out nicely.) Our plan is to sit back, preferably not even attack that much, and just kill everyone slowly and painfully.

Okay, we could play Exsanguinate and Torment of Hailfire, but won’t, because they are just what we Finns would call “mauton” (tasteless). Gary sort of belongs to the same group, although it actually require set-up, which makes me like it quite a bit more. Loyal Subordinate (from the new set) would work… except we can never actually control our own Commander.

Part of me would like to play a Pirate theme here as well, because Forerunner of the Coalition would work as well. Then again, who’s going to stop me? Playing them will help the curve quite a bit as well.

That’s not exactly a great selection, but it’s something. And I just like them. You can figure out what you like and replace these with that selection of cards.

I won’t put much card draw into the deck, as there’s always Xantcha herself to handle that. I’ll put in some, though, with the goal of smoothing out land drops.

Otherwise, we just want to make attacking us difficult.

Otherwise, just some removal, and some other pre-emptive measures.

Depending on your meta, you might want various ways to prevent lifegain, but I don’t usually bother with that.

All this leaves us with room for 47 sources of mana. I know many of you want put that many into your deck, but I would. Around 40 lands and seven artifact sources or artifacts that find them.

1 thought on “EDH Deck Time: Xantcha”

I managed to put Spiteflame Witch and Suffer the Past into another article which I was working on at the same time instead of this one, so those are two cards I was definitely looking at when researching this deck. Just something you might want to keep in mind.